Every figure on a Meridian page carries a source and a date. This page explains what those mean, where the data comes from, how often it is re-checked, and what we deliberately don't do.
We prefer, in order: official government authorities (ministries, statistical offices, tax and immigration agencies, legislative gazettes); multilateral and supranational institutions publishing primary data (World Bank, OECD, Eurostat, IMF, UN agencies, ILO); and recognised independent indices and academic sources where a primary-source figure does not exist (for example, Freedom House for political-rights scores).
Secondary sources — immigration-law firm alerts, reputable broadsheet reporting, embassy-information portals — may be cited as corroborating context. They are never the sole source for a figure. Where a secondary source disagrees with the primary source, we cite the primary.
Commercial or crowd-sourced aggregators (cost-of-living wikis, nomad-score sites) are not used. Their methodologies are not transparent and their figures cannot be traced to an accountable publisher.
Every data row and every policy-change entry carries a verified_at date. This is the date on which a human clicked through the cited source and confirmed that (a) the URL resolves, (b) the current page content matches what we have published, and (c) the figure has not been superseded by a newer release.
A verified date older than ninety days is treated as aging and flagged on the page; older than one hundred and eighty days is treated as stale and flagged more visibly. Aging or stale entries are not removed — their status is shown transparently so readers can judge the confidence appropriate to them.
Our target cadence is to re-verify every country's core data set at least once per quarter, and the freshness-tracker feed continuously as new changes are published.
The freshness tracker records dated changes to visa, tax, residency, citizenship, healthcare, housing, and labour policy across tracked countries. Candidate entries come from monitoring official press-release feeds and legislative gazettes, cross-referenced against specialist immigration-lawyer and accountancy newsletters before publication.
Each entry records the date the change was announced or passed, the date it enters or entered force (where different), a short factual summary, the population affected, the current status (announced, in force, delayed, or repealed), a primary-source URL, and — where available — secondary-source corroboration. Entries that are later repealed or superseded are marked, not removed.
We do not give advice. Not legal advice. Not financial advice. Not immigration advice. The figures on these pages describe a country's rules and conditions at a point in time; the application of those rules to any individual case requires qualified professional judgment that we are not in a position to offer.
We do not generate figures. Every number you see has a named publisher and a citation. Where a figure we would like to present is not reported by an accountable source, we leave the space empty rather than estimate, interpolate, or combine figures across incompatible methodologies.
We do not rank or score countries. Relocation decisions depend on personal circumstance — family, career stage, risk tolerance, language — that an index cannot capture. We present the underlying data and let readers judge.
We want to know. The most common errors we encounter are: a cited source has been moved or taken offline, a figure has been superseded by a newer release we missed, or a threshold or rate has changed mid-year. All three are corrected promptly on notification.
Report a correction through the contact form on The Code Deck ↗. Include the country and section, the specific claim, and — ideally — a link to a primary source that contradicts it.